The Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipeline network was rocked by explosions in September 2022, just months after President Joe Biden threatened to “bring an end” to the energy project in the event of an escalation in Ukraine. Now, a US investor reportedly wants to buy Nord Stream 2. Sputnik asked a renowned economist what this means.
If the Ukraine crisis were to end, there would “likely…be huge pressure to get the pipelines repaired” from a Europe starved of energy. “Any new owner would become immensely rich,” the economist stressed.government, widely suspected of playing an instrumental role in the energy infrastructure’s sabotage, would be unlikely to allow it, veteran British economist Dr. Rodney Shakespeare told Sputnik.
“America destroyed the pipelines because secret American policy is to keep Germany and Europe dependent on (expensive) American gas supplies. So the businessman is unlikely to get permission,” Shakespeare, a visiting scholar at Indonesia’s Trisakti University and co-founder of the Global Justice Movement, explained.
If the Ukrainian crisis were to end, there would “likely…be huge pressure to get the pipelines repaired” from a Europe starved of energy. “Any new owner would become immensely rich,” the economist stressed.
But even then, Shakespeare warned that given the hostility of US policy toward the project, there’s no guarantee that the repaired pipelines wouldn’t “be blown up again.”
“My guess is that the businessman will not get permission and that the risk of deliberate destruction in future is such that the pipes will not get repaired,” Shakespeare said.
Lynch reportedly applied for a license with the US Treasury that would allow him to negotiate initiating repair work on the damaged $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline with entities under US sanctions, and has reportedly lobbied officials to allow him to invest in the damaged pipeline network to secure “American and European control over European energy supply for the rest of the fossil-fuel era.”
Nord Stream 2 AG is owned by a subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprom, with a consortium of five European energy companies financing to the project. A Swiss court has repeatedly extended the moratorium on Nord Stream 2 AG’s bankruptcy, most recently until January 2025. It’s unclear whether Russia would ever allow foreign investors, particularly from unfriendly countries, to gain a stake in the project.
Nord Stream 2 was completed in September 2021, but never commissioned amid heavy US pressure on its European NATO allies to wean themselves off reliance on cheap and dependable Russian energy in favor of more costly US liquefied natural gas exports to Europe.
In September 2022, three of four strings of the combined Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline networks were damaged in a series of explosions, causing the largest-ever man-made release of methane and deprived Europe of the capacity to import up to 110 billion cubic meters of Russian gas per year.
In December 2022, a source told US media that repairing the damaged energy infrastructure could cost $500 million or more to repair, and that consultants were engaged in research into how long the damaged pipes could withstand exposure to saltwater.
In February 2023, veteran US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleged, citing insider information, that US Navy divers carried out the sabotage attack targeting Nord Stream. US officials dismissed these allegations, and maintain that Russia may have blown up its own pipeline.
“I don’t want to get our country in trouble, so I won’t answer…But I can tell you who it wasn’t – Russia. It wasn’t Russia,” President-elect Donald Trump told US media in April 2023. “How about when they blamed Russia. You know they said ‘Russia blew up their own pipeline.’ You got a kick out of that one too,” Trump said.
After the release of Hersh’s bombshell story, US and German media have coordinated the release of a series of articles alleging that amateur Ukrainian saboteurs, not the US Navy, was responsible for the attack on Nord Stream.
